Tracking changes in ecosystems is both vital and extremely difficult. We need to know how differences in climate and land use will affect the success of different species, and what impacts this will have on the wider environment. Plant-pollinator interactions are particularly important for the stability of ecological communities, but how will these relationships be affected in the future and what will happen to the ecosystem services they provide?

Humanity has a data storage problem: More data were created in the past 2 years than in all of preceding history. And that torrent of information may soon outstrip the ability of hard drives to capture it. Now, researchers report that they’ve come up with a new way to encode digital data in DNA to create the highest-density large-scale data storage scheme ever invented. Capable of storing 215 petabytes (215 million gigabytes) in a single gram of DNA, the system could, in principle, store every bit of datum ever recorded by humans in a container about the size and weight of a couple of pickup trucks. But whether the technology takes off may depend on its cost.